The sterile society: hyperselection and the loss of adaptive variance

Self-organizing systems utilize information to maintain ordered states. With competitive pressure, these systems optimize toward proxies of their goals-tractable indicators that are informationally useful because they simplify complex objectives, resulting in the survival and prevalence of systems that are most efficient at pursuing proxy targets. While proxy optimization enhances short-term success, it progressively strips away variance upon which long-term adaptation, resilience, and human flourishing depend. Modern technologies escalate these dynamics to intensities without clear evolutionary precedent, operating as a form of hyperselection on proxy-maximizing strategies which lead to increasingly formulaic, homogenized, and sterile environments. The detrimental impact of hyperselection and an overly optimized world-from pop culture and academia to urban design and wellbeing-are discussed in terms of their active role in creating evolutionary mismatch and the importance of seemingly "inefficient" processes as sources of adaptive input.